UofL asking public to help preserve old newspaper

Ron Gregory

February 15, 2013

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — The University of Louisville Libraries is asking for help from the public to preserve and provide more access to “The Louisville Leader,” a newspaper that covered the city’s black community between 1917 and 1950.

University Archivist Carrie Daniels said in a statement that efforts to digitize microfilm so that the newspaper would be available on the Internet haven’t been as fruitful as hoped because some characters have faded and type is misaligned. She said digital images weren’t clear enough to use character recognition software.

That means people are needed to transcribe from the images so that they can be made available online.

People who want to help with the project can go to the website http://digital.library.louisville.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/leader/ , which has instructions as well as the articles that need transcription.